Haunted by the Earl's Touch - By Ann Lethbridge Page 0,1

beyond the mullioned windows lit the room in a ghostly light. An image seared on Bane’s vision. Stark otherworldly faces. Mouths dark pits in pale skin as the air moved with their startled gasps. They looked like the monsters who had peopled his childish nightmares. His enemies. The people who wanted him dead, according to his uncle. His mother’s brother.

In truth, he hadn’t expected to see family members here. He’d preferred to think of the old man alone and friendless as he gasped his last.

Just like Bane’s mother.

If not for this man, his mother might be alive today and the guilt of her death would not weigh so heavily on Bane’s shoulders. No matter how often he tried to put the blame where it belonged, on the man in the bed, he could not deny his own part in the events of that day. His thoughtless anger that had put her at risk. Hell, even his very existence, the reason she had run from this house in the first place.

Power and wealth brought invulnerability. His mother had drilled it into him since the day he could understand his place in the world. And that was why he was here. That and to see the old man off to the next world. He simply couldn’t pass up the chance to see the dismay in the old earl’s gaze.

He could count the number of times he and the old man had met face to face on one hand. But he had always been there, in the shadows, a threatening presence. Forcing his will where it was not wanted. Guiding Bane’s education, trying to choose his friends, but his mother’s brother had been more than a match for the earl. Bane still remembered his horror as he stood with his uncle on the doorstep of this house and listened to an argument over him, about money, about cruelty and murder. Accusations that had haunted him as a youth. Fed his anger at this man.

But his temper was not the hot flash of his youth, the kind that brought trouble to him and those around him. It was a cold burn in his gut, controlled, and carefully directed. Guilt over his mother’s death had taught him that lesson.

Since then, Bane had striven to be the gentleman his mother always wanted him to be. He had battled for the respect of the scions of other noble houses at school and held his head high. But at heart he was the son of a coalminer’s daughter. And proud of it. Mining was in his blood and showed in the scars on his knuckles and the muscles in his shoulders developed at the coalface.

He was more Walker than Beresford, whether or not he had any Beresford blood.

The lightning faded. Shadows once more reclaimed all but the man in the bed. As his coughing subsided, the earl’s gnarled fingers clawed at the bedsheets, then beckoned.

Resistance stiffened Bane’s spine. He wasn’t about to be called to heel like some slavering cur. But, no, apparently this particular summons was not for him. The old man must not have seen him yet, since it was the two women who moved towards the bed, Mrs Hampton nudging the younger one ahead of her, making her stumble.

Bane took a half-step, a warning on his lips, but the girl recovered inches from the earl’s warding hand, mumbling an apology.

Who was she? Some indigent relative looking for crumbs in the final hours? There would be no crumbs for any one of them. Not if Bane had a say.

‘So you are Mary.’ The old man’s voice sounded like a door creaking in the wind. ‘She said you were no great beauty, but not that you were a beanpole. You take after your father.’

‘You knew my father?’ the girl asked, and Bane sensed how keenly she awaited his answer. Her body seemed to vibrate with the depth of her interest.

The old man grimaced. ‘I met him once. Kneel, girl. I’m getting a crick in my neck.’

Like a supplicant, the girl sank down. Anger rose hot and hard in Bane’s throat on the girl’s behalf, but she seemed unperturbed by the command and gazed calmly into the dying man’s face.

She spoke again, but her low voice did not reach all the way to Bane in the shadows beside the door.

The old man glared at her, lifted a clawed hand to twist her chin this way and that. Glimpses of her profile showed strong classical features, a straight aristocratic